Posts Tagged ‘liberal arts’

Digital Humanities and the Future of Liberal Arts – October 113:30 – 5:00 p.m.
Wilson Research Collaboration Studio, University of Minnesota

A survey of some of the most exciting applications of digitization in the College of Liberal Arts along with a discussion of the potential of digital humanities for advancing and enriching our understanding of the human condition. Moderated by Jane Blocker, Art History.

As an example of a more promising liberal arts partnership, Eshleman pointed to LACOL, the Liberal Arts Consortium for Online Learning. LACOL’s nine member institutions comprise Amherst, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Haverford, Pomona, Swarthmore, Vassar, Washington and Lee and Williams. LACOL is an effort to create an experimental framework that supports project work across the nine campuses. There are interesting experiments happening on each campus, and LACOL provides opportunities to use a digital network to take those to a new level, said Elizabeth Evans, LACOL’s director, who joined Eshleman on the Future Trends Forum virtual stage to describe the consortium’s setup.

This involves a multi-campus team of faculty and instructional designers, all organized around a central project, which has its ups and downs, she added.

She said she has learned to keep the focus off of technology initially. She asks faculty members to think about what have they wanted to do around student learning and why. “It is about that first, and technology second,” she stressed, adding that she has moved away from quantitative evaluation of projects and more toward storytelling.

The Big University

for the past many decades colleges narrowed down to focus on professional academic disciplines, but now there are a series of forces leading them to widen out so that they leave a mark on the full human being.